A day in the life of a doorknob in a crack house. (idea)

Randall Munroe once observed that a fire burns the same on a hot day as it does in Antarctica, because to a fire, everything is cold. This observation relates to my assignment to write about a day in the life of a crack house doorknob because, while to us, a crack house might have unusual and frenetic activity, to a doorknob, all activity is unusual and frenetic. If we are to anthropomorphize a doorknob, which was what I was told to do, I would imagine them having neutral feelings towards their surroundings. I imagine a doorknob has a vague consciousness (how it produces thoughts without a nervous system, I couldn't say), and knows when it is being held, knows when it is being turned, knows when it is being pulled, and maybe can even feel the hands that hold it. And maybe sometimes the doorknob's equilibrium is disturbed when it is held too tightly or pulled too roughly. But would a doorknob know or care why? The imperatives of fleshtorsions (that is what doorknobs call humans) would be unimportant. People desperately trying to open the door to get crack? Children playing a joyful game of hide and seek? All the same to our doorknob. If our doorknob is even on a well traveled door. It might be in a closet somewhere it never gets used, or it might not even be attached to a door.

Basically, I don't think our doorknob cares. Its life is a quiet cycle of repetitive motion, perhaps harried by occasional rude urgencies.

Now, on to crack houses. I don't actually know what cocaine, or crack cocaine, does. I know a lot about pharmacology, both from research, and from experience, and I know cocaine is a stimulant that is somewhat similar to amphetamine, but I don't actually know what crack does. The connotations of crack house escape me, especially since they seem to be a bit of a bogeyman, often with a not-too-subtle racist undertones. Crack houses are like haunted houses, full of zombies that don't even act human, places where the normal image of domesticity and human life have been twisted and warped beyond our understandings. The sensationalism and train wreck aspect of the crack house has, for the most part, not been used when crystal meth and opiate addiction came to white communities.